“Viewpoint diversity” is the view that institutions of higher education ought to cultivate a wide range of perspectives on campus to ensure that inquiry on campus proceeds in an open and lively way. It may sound to some like a truism, but it’s meant as more than a truism. If taken in the latter way, it is by definition and intention a controversial doctrine.

“Institutional neutrality” is the view that institutions of higher education should refrain from avowing controversial claims in a public way.

Suppose that an institution endorses viewpoint diversity. Then either it does so by public avowal or by secret codicil.

The idea of a secret codicil to adopt viewpoint diversity seems absurd. Viewpoint diversity is a pedagogical doctrine that determines the institutional aim of a university. It’s absurd to think that a doctrine of this sort should be kept secret. A university that tried would be unable to get the informed consent of any participant–student, faculty, staff, visitor, vendor, or alum–to participate in the life of the institution. In any case, since viewpoint diversity holds that inquiry into all matters should proceed in an “open and lively way,” a secret codicil seems like a contradiction in terms: a secret commitment can’t, by definition, be discussed in an open or lively way. 

It follows that viewpoint diversity must be avowed in a public fashion. But that gives rise to a problem: if viewpoint diversity is controversial, but institutional neutrality proscribes public avowals of controversial claims, then the avowal of viewpoint diversity contradicts a commitment to institutional neutrality.

In other words, unless we convert viewpoint diversity into a meaningless, uncontroversial truism, the two commitments are inconsistent. And yet they’re blithely avowed as though no inconsistency existed.  

I asked AI to depict someone having and eating one and the same cake. But no matter how many times I asked, they gave him two

One way to escape this implication is to turn viewpoint diversity into an uncontroversial truism. But no one who avows it treats it that way. And it’s easy to see why. There’s no point in avowing an uncontroversial truism, and no mileage to be gotten from it.

Another is to re-fashion institutional neutrality in such a way as to allow certain public avowals but proscribe others. To avoid being ad hoc, however, these exception-clauses would have to have a defensible rationale. And to avoid the “secret codicil” objection above, this defensible rationale would have to be both publicly avowed and publicly defended. Though I find the endeavor unpromising, I have to grant at least the possibility of success. But even so, there’s no neutral way of succeeding. The endeavor succeeds if the proponents of institutional neutrality produce a successful, publicly avowed account of institutional neutrality that requires neutrality in some contexts but not others, where the distinction has a principled basis and is publicly defended to the satisfaction of reasonable critics. By definition, that can’t be done in a way that’s neutral as between the doctrine being defended and its rejection. 

Suppose someone made the attempt to defend institutional neutrality in a public way. If they did, institutional neutrality would in that case have become more of a dead letter than a living commitment. An institution committed to institutional neutrality would be obliged to defend it in ways that bypassed the usual demands of the doctrine itself.

Think about what this would look like in practice. The institution would come out and make a statement about its commitment to institutional neutrality–presumably one stating the reasons for the adoption of the commitment as such. Now imagine that critics (including some at the university itself) come along and criticize the commitment. The institution, waiving the usual demands of institutional neutrality, then responds publicly to these criticisms. The critics rejoin, and so on. There is ex hypothesi no literal incoherence here, but there is a lot of bypassing of the core prescription of the doctrine–so much that one is left wondering why anyone would feel the need to engage in all of that bypassing while still avowing the doctrine. What’s the point? The doctrine seems to have been swallowed up by its exception clause. 

The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to a public defense of viewpoint diversity.

The bottom line is that prima facie, a commitment to institutional diversity contradicts one to institutional neutrality. No matter how you slice it, there’s a problem here that demands solution but hasn’t gotten one.